How to enable Alexa notifications

December 4, 2017

Transcript

While notifications have been available for echo to echo calling and messaging for a while now there are newer notifications which are different.
They allow third party skills to deliver notifications to you if you so choose.
Here's how to enable notifications on Alexa's speakers.
As of now, the only notifications outside messaging and calling are Amazon Shopping and Dominos.
These will notify you when something you have ordered from Amazon or your pizza order goes out for delivery.
Notifications will be signaled with a chime and a pulsing yellow light on the light ring.
To check notifications, ask Alexa what are my notifications?
Or what did I miss?
Amazon made the brilliant call to make notifications an opt in process on a per-skill basis.
Which means you will have to manually opt in to notifications for each and every skill you want.
And skills you don't want to hear from, you will not Ever hear from.
Open the Alexa app on Android or iOS and expand the side menu, select settings, and under accounts select notifications.
Tap one of the options and then click the toggles beside each notification you want to enable to turn it on.
Amazon Shopping for example gives you four separate options for notifications, others may only give you one.
Optionally, you can open a skill page from the skill catalog.
Tap settings, then tap manage permissions and give or revoke notification privileges from there.
If you don't want Alexa notifications to disrupt your sleep, especially with third party skills added to the mix, You will want to create a schedule for Do Not Disturb.
To do this, open the Alexa app on your phone and go to Settings, then Devices.
Select one of your Alexa speakers and under Do Not Disturb, select Scheduled.
Click the toggle besides Scheduled to enable a schedule then click edit.
Set a start and end time for do not disturb, and click save changes.
Now you won't hear an audible chime when new notifications roll in after hours, but you will still see the pulsing yellow light.
For more tips and tricks and other how tos be sure to check out cnet.com/